After a Life Spent Behind
Bars, Out Walks a Free ManNew York Times By Ralph
Blumenthal
August 20, 2004

DALLAS,
Aug. 18 - Robert Carroll Coney was in prison when President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated. He was in prison when the Beatles came to
America, when men walked on the moon, when the war raged in Vietnam,
when Communism fell, and when the Internet and cellphones were
invented.

But last week, after spending almost every day of the last 42 years
behind bars, Mr. Coney, 76, walked out of the Angelina County jail in
Lufkin.

A state district judge had found credence in Mr. Coney's longstanding
claims that he had been beaten into pleading guilty, without a lawyer,
to a $2,000 Safeway supermarket robbery that landed him a life sentence
in 1962, a term he fled only to be imprisoned many times in other
states, escaping often, recaptured often, until he was returned to
Texas last year to serve out his original term.

The judge, David V. Wilson, furthermore found that a long-forgotten
court order should have expunged those criminal charges as far back as
1973.

All that and much more happened to him, Mr. Coney says in court filings
and an interview in Dallas, where he has been reunited with his
common-law wife of 50 years, Shirley Jackson, who has stood by him,
even going to jail herself for smuggling him hacksaw blades.

"I knew he was a good man, and I loved him," said Ms. Jackson, 65. Mr.
Coney, quiet-spoken and wiry, said he was not bitter. "Anger is not
going to solve anything," he said, and besides, "I believe in the
system." Meanwhile, he was struggling to get used to store prices, like
$1.69 for a loaf of bread, and to having to dial his own area code to
make a local call.

In the judge's findings and Mr. Coney's accounts, the tale unfolds with
echoes of "Les Misérables," with Mr. Coney, a combat veteran of
World
War II and Korea who had already run afoul of the law, cast into the
American prison archipelago after being threatened into pleading guilty
and ordered to shut up in court by a guard who silenced him with a
racist epithet.

Mr. Coney said sheriff's deputies deliberately slammed a jail gate on
his hand. "My fingers looked like sticks of baloney," he said holding
up a misshapen hand. Judge Wilson wrote that the former Angelina County
sheriff, Leon Jones, and his deputies "were known for obtaining
confessions by physical force." One of his tactics, he wrote, "was to
get a prisoner's fingers on either side of a jail cell bar and squeeze
those fingers until a prisoner confessed."

But the former district attorney in the case, Hulen B. Brown, now an
84-year-old lawyer in East Texas, challenged that version of events. "I
have never heard of any stuff like what's put in here," Mr. Brown said
of the judge's findings.

Much of the history is difficult to document, Judge Wilson
acknowledged. Sheriff Jones, the original judge and the court reporter
are dead. The transcript is lost. But the Lufkin lawyer who said he had
been called in at the last minute to stand by Mr. Coney in court to
validate the predetermined guilty plea said Mr. Coney told him
afterward that he had been threatened into confessing. "It was well
oiled," said the lawyer, Gilbert Spring, of the plea agreement, reached
before his participation. And he said, "That sheriff was the most
terrible sheriff we ever had."

Speaking in the offices of a Dallas paralegal, John Dejean of Judicial
Law Assistance Services, whom the couple praised as the first to
respond to the hundreds of appeals they sent over the years, and with
advising lawyers, David P. O'Neill of Huntsville and Suzanne Lomenick
of Dallas, standing by, Mr. Coney acknowledged a life often on the
wrong side of the law and so tangled that even he at times despaired of
sorting it out. He said that a month before his 17th birthday he added
two years to his age to enlist in the Navy, serving with other blacks
in the risky ammunition holds of a destroyer escort in the last months
of the war in the Pacific in 1945.

He re-enlisted in 1948, this time in the Army under an alias, Roland
Smith, landing in Korea where, he said, he was captured by North Korean
guerrillas, before escaping and winding up in a stateside hospital only
to be questioned about his deceptions. While at Fort Polk, he met
Shirley Jackson, then 14, in Baton Rouge, La., but they decided to wait
until she was 17 and he 28 to join in common law marriage. A son, Rick,
was born in 1955.

But then Mr. Coney said he was caught passing a $65 bad check in
Georgia and convicted on federal charges of driving a chop shop's
stolen car with a gun under the seat and sentenced to 15 years in
Leavenworth. He had served enough time for release when he was picked
up for the Safeway robbery.

Mr. Coney said that he was in Lufkin driving another man, Henry Cooper,
the night the sheriff claimed the Safeway was held up but that Mr.
Cooper had entered the store alone. "I had nothing to do with it," Mr.
Coney said. Both men were identified by witnesses and confessed,
Sheriff Jones said. But in his later application for a writ of habeas
corpus, Mr. Coney wrote he "was ruthlessly physically slapped, kicked
and punched by deputies," called the "N-word" and told he could be
taken away and shot.

Transported to prison on March 19, 1962, he escaped on May 8, prison
records show. Mr. Coney says he bribed a guard with $1,500 but a
spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle
Lyons, said that could not be confirmed.

Two months later, he said, he was rearrested by the government for
violating terms of his federal release. When he got out again, he was
rearrested in Louisiana for passing small counterfeit checks - for
food, he said - and sentenced to 44 years in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary, but the sentence was overturned after he had served 12
years, court records show. He escaped once, he said, making it into the
Mississippi River before the current thwarted him.

Another time, he said, he escaped from a Jackson, Miss., hospital by
walking out the door and leaving a sawed bar on the window to confound
the authorities. The hacksaw blades had been supplied by Ms. Jackson,
who spent nine months in jail as a result.

Meanwhile, Mr. Coney had filed a writ seeking dismissal of the Lufkin
charges on constitutional grounds. On Sept. 24, 1973, the motion was
granted by a Texas district judge in Angelina County, David Walker, who
ruled that Mr. Coney "has been found rehabilitated" and "is not a
person with present propensities toward violence." The district
attorney concurred.

But no one told Mr. Coney and the order was never put into effect.

In 1983, Mr. Coney was arrested in Mississippi on an assault charge
that he describes as a misunderstanding involving a woman wounded by a
ricocheting bullet and a plot to murder him for double-indemnity
insurance. He got 20 years, during which he worked with AIDS patients
and won commendations.

He was released in March 2003. Texas was waiting - returning him to
Huntsville to finish out the rest of his life term. But that October he
filed a new writ, which set Judge Wilson on his investigation that
freed Mr. Coney. He and Shirley were to have been formally married on
Friday but the ceremony was put off until Mr. Coney can obtain
something better than a prison ID.

Judge Wilson had one final recommendation: "I hope the petitioner hires
a good screenwriter."